


elegy

by younglegends



Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 09:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11894559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: Stages of grief.





	elegy

The story is a perfunctory thing. Quotes and statistics and numbers that don’t add up to much at all—just a tower too tall for its roots, falling out of the sky. No names. It feels like an eulogy, almost. An elegy for the dead. But there were no bodies found, either, so Karen types it up and lets it go, along with all the rubble and dust that eventually gets cleared away, brick by brick. Piece by broken piece.

It was never the real story anyway.

The real story’s on the ground. Always been. Already building its way back up. It follows the people of the city, all of them, working and living and fighting the everyday fight. It’s buried by shadows, by gunfire in back alleys and neat-pressed suits in office buildings, but it’s there, lurking, waiting for someone to reach in and unearth it, out and up into the light. So she writes. She tells the story of this city she loves. This city he loved.

You deserve better, he’d told her.

So do you, she’d said.

But he was already cracking a rueful smile back at her. Like they were past that, now. Like it was all very much too late.

Which isn’t fair, because if anyone knows the meaning of _too late_ it’s Karen, Karen who was almost eaten alive by this city until he plucked her out from its underbelly and gave her a bright gleaming glimpse into a bigger world, a world she’d thought they could all be a part of, together—

But the world looks different, now, because of more than just a chunk taken out of its skyline, and the city runs on and on and there are stories sprouting out of the ground, bleeding into the streets, each and every night, so Karen writes and writes and sometimes when it gets too much she stands up from her chair, walks around the office. Not quite hers, and never will be. She reaches out to touch, to run her fingers over the frames of the articles on the wall, the smooth metal of the filing cabinets, the dog-eared pages in the folders, well-worn, well-loved, one of them her own. The desk that belonged to one of the first heroes she’s ever known.

Though there are so many of them, these days. More than she’d ever believed in.

In her palm she allows herself to hold that tiny last grain of hope, and she clenches it into a fist.

 

After all the chaos and the collapse the steady stream of life goes on with a gentleness almost too much to bear. Luke’s body knows violence as well as a shield, but the golden light of the sun is a different kind of weight, soft on his skin and sinking in. He walks the streets of a city already moving on and can’t help but think it should be harder. The loss it’s been through, the cracks in the ground. All of it should be clinging on, not going down without a fight.

He visits Mrs. Miller, sometimes. For a cup of tea. She always opens the door for him, in her house much too big for one, sunken under the weight of its own grief, but still standing. Pictures still on the walls. Pinned to the fridge. She catches him looking, once.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “Wondering why I don’t take them down.”

“No, no,” he tries to say, but she plows on, straight over him.

“They’re all I got left,” she says, and it’s not bitter, but matter-of-fact. Exhaled like just another breath. “So I got to hold onto them, right?”

He runs his fingers over one of the photographs. Smiling faces, caught forever in laughter. Impossibly young.

“They’re beautiful,” he says, and she nods, satisfied.

“Damn straight they are.”

When he leaves the sun looks brighter than it did before, somehow. Touching all of the city it can reach. He stands there and watches it, for a while. Thinks about holding on. By the skin of your teeth, by a thread. By the word of a prayer. Uncurls his fist, as though catching the light in his hand, ready to receive.

Sometimes people drift away, but they’re never too far to reach. As long as they’re alive. He knows this now. Adjusting the flowers in Misty’s hospital room, telling her the truth of everything as she eyes him from her bed and comments—resurrection, _really._  Taking a swig of his coffee to hide his smile at Jessica’s grimace, putting on her shades and complaining about the earliness of the hour. Listening to Danny talk about where he came from, what he’s been through, and about a power greater than the self, belief in his eyes shining brighter than the glow of his fist.

And as for the rest—All you can do is be patient, and wait for them to come back to you.

He wakes early enough to watch the sun rise all the way into the sky, inch by inch. Reaches out to trace the curve of Claire’s cheek, beside him, still asleep. Her collarbone. Her forearm, splayed out across the sheets.

“Good morning,” she mumbles. Waking up. Gold lining the lashes of her eyes.

He takes her hand.

“Yes,” he says. “It is.”

 

You can patch someone up and still it feels like they’re only just holding together at the edges, ready to leak out with so much as a push. Claire knows this more intimately than anyone. Time after time of rushed job, cleaning blood and setting bones and steady fingers never shaking, not once. Some part of her always astonished at what more a body could take. And then, at what it could come back from. Until the next time, of course, showing up on her doorstep at an ungodly hour with a grin like an open wound. Rinse and repeat.

Claire thinks this city’s like that, too, always good for a fight, always ready to break. But then putting itself back together again. The hole in the ground filling itself in, waiting to be built over. Resilient as resurrection—a concept she hears isn’t too impossible, these days. She almost wouldn’t believe it, except she’s seen it with her own eyes.

And maybe she’s been through something like it herself, too. A rebirth of sorts, because the person she used to be isn’t the same one looking back at her in the mirror. She’d walked straight out of one world into another the night she pulled a body out from the trash, and at the time she’d tried to back away, but it kept coming back to her, clear as a sign—she’s a part of this, now. The foundation, Colleen had said, giving her own words back to her, and she’s not so sure about that, exactly, but either way there’s no turning back from this now.

It’s not exactly what she’d envisioned. Tying together the loose ends of a city that seems to spawn martyrs like coins on the street, and at first she’d found it unbelievable, extraordinary even, but she’s known them long enough now to know they’re just people. Stitched them up enough to know they’re just human. Every one of them with their own corner in this city, wanting nothing more than to protect it.

Which leaves Claire to protect them, in turn. In her own way, with compression bandages and syringes and needle and thread. Healing hurts as much as anything—she’d know, she’s an expert. But it always sets in anyway. Recovery after the rot. It can’t be helped; it’s the way bodies are built. All of them rising up against the loss that strikes them down. Life after death. She’s seen stranger things, by now.

It feels almost full circle, now—that the man who’d started all of this, who’d pulled her in, is now the one who’s gone, left her in the middle of it all. But then again, she has a nagging feeling that he’s not done with this city yet. Call it intuition, or superstition, or just plain old faith. But maybe another miracle isn’t too much to ask.

 

These days Jessica feels less and less like a hairline fracture waiting to snap and more like a faded old bruise. No longer tender to the touch, but still a marker of past pain, just under the skin. A reminder of what’s been lost. Of the healing that’s still to come.

In any case the city won’t let her rest anyway. It’s got a rhythm, a rush. You just gotta sweep yourself back up into it. Like ticketing onto the train and following its rattle all the way home.

Right now she’s running through the streets tailing some guy she’d only wanted to talk to for a case, for _god’s_ sake, but he’d taken one look at her face and split, fucking hell. If he knows who she is then he should know better than to think she won’t catch him, anyway. She’s hot on his heels when a rustle of movement from above distracts her for a moment, eyes scanning the rooftops, remembering the shape of the impossible, the shadow of the devil—But it’s just a bird, lifting off in a startle of wings, and Jessica puffs out a sigh, breath silver in the air. Throws herself back into the chase.

And this job’s given her hell and it’s also let her claw back out of it, this city’s run her into the ground and also picked her back up off it, and every night she peels back another layer of grit and rust from its shiny skyline to reveal another awful ugly side of it, throws a punch that always lands into the sickening crack of bone and it’s tiring, the running and the fighting and the hurting but she’ll be damned if she ever stops, because it’s the motion that keeps her going, still.

In the mornings Malcolm brings her coffee that’s suspiciously devoid of vodka. Smiles, sweet, and doesn’t give her shit about the circles under her eyes. She can rely on Trish for that anyway, Trish who stops by sometimes in the evenings with Chinese takeout for three and leans back in Jessica’s swivel chair, nodding in consideration as Jessica and Malcolm bounce ideas and theories off each other for whatever new case they’ve got, poring over their notes and punctuating their points with chopstick jabs until the hours tick by and Jessica wakes up with hair in her mouth. Not her own. Soft and clean and Jessica cracks an eye open from where her head’s rested on Trish’s shoulder, the two of them on the floor, slumped back against the desk.

“Shh,” Trish says, sounding absentminded, as if only half-awake herself, “go back to sleep.”

Malcolm’s snoring, facedown on the floor. The papers of their case notes are scattered across the room like fallen snow. The glass of her door gleams uncovered, stencil lettering reflecting back at her, letting in the light.

 

This city’s something else, and maybe it’s a little too soon to start calling it his, but Danny was born here and he’d come back to it and he’d sunk his fist into the heart of it, thirty stories deep and still too dark to see through the golden glow of impact, so really, he thinks he’s got the right. He’s always been quick to warm up to new things, anyway. People. He can’t help it, really. So lost he sets his roots down wherever he can find stable ground, not quite realizing he has to tear them all up again when it’s time to leave, but here—

Luke’s smile, won over by something small, really, something stupid Danny’d said, but no less sweet for it. Jessica’s sharp laugh at his face when he tries some of whatever she’s drinking at the seedy bar he’d found her at, brittle around the edges and lilting up cruel; tells him _you’re in the wrong neighbourhood, kid_ but doesn’t tell him to leave. Colleen’s bare feet thudding against the mats on the floor, turning around to greet him in the middle of practicing, katana still unsheathed in her hand as she leans in to meet him in a kiss, hair falling wild all around her face. And a message whispered to him in his ear, loud and clear, carried through the streets of this city like a promise, up the fire escapes and the stairwells onto the rooftops, where Danny looks down, watches the world open itself up for him.

Here, Danny thinks. Here could be his home.

 

And the minutes tick by into hours and the hours into days, and the days all look the same from the gleaming windows of his sterile office, steel and glass and chrome, the city reflected through a million surfaces staring back at him, but every once in a while he’s walking down the street, and in a sudden bloom of noise and movement and loud raucous laughter spilling out from the opening door of a rowdy bar leaking neon into the shadowed puddles and gutters of the night he’ll remember—

And how long were you losing him, anyway? Certainly it didn’t happen just overnight. Endless days and nights of it, spilling out of your fingers like sand, every time he gave just a little bit more of himself up to the city, left you with nothing but a smile you never even saw through. Maybe you never had him at all. Smoke in your fist.

And anyway he was never yours, he was this city’s. Foggy scuffs at a pebble on the street with his shoe, opens his palm and goes home.


End file.
